Me/Web - Bookmarks

In my nerdy ways, I tend to spend weekends the same way as I spend the rest of my time - in front of the computer. I open sites like Reddit.com and I follow links. I open my feedreader and I follow links. I open Wikipedia or E2 to check something and I follow links. At the end of the weekend, I find myself sleepy on a work night with 50 open Firefox tabs. What do I do? The sensible thing - I "bookmark all tabs" and go to bed, obviously alone. Next weekend those bookmarks are not so interesting, So I open up Reddit.com...
So now I have a backlog of 120-some bookmarks I would actually like to follow. I estimate it would take me a month, so it would probably take me six months if I step on it.

Code/FFDB/Django - Query by Many2Many relations

Neither the docs not the IRC chennel helped much, so I had to hack my way through Django's guts using my non-existent Python skills to create the following generic manager method that finds stuff according to multiple related stuff. The official docs only show how to get e.g. a publication through an article it published, but not how to get a publication that published two articles (or three, or… n). I use it to find a ship involving some characters.

class FooManager(models.Manager):
  def get_by_m2m(self, m2m_field_name, related_obj_ids, specified_only = False):
    """
    Returns QuerySet with objects that are connected to
     all specified "related_obj_ids" through "m2m_field_name".
    Limits result to only those objects that are linked _only_
     to the specified related objects upon request.
    """
    assert len(related_obj_ids) > 0
    meta = self.model._meta
    m2m = [x for x in meta.many_to_many if x.name == m2m_field_name]
    if len(m2m) != 1:
      raise 'ManyToMany Field "%s" not found in model "%s.%s"!' %         (m2m_field_name, meta.app_label, meta.object_name)
    m2m = m2m[0]
    pk_column = meta.pk.column
    m2m_table = m2m.m2m_db_table()
    source_col = m2m.m2m_column_name()
    target_col = m2m.m2m_reverse_name()
    tables = []
    params = []
    where = ['"%s"."%s" = t1."%s"' % (meta.db_table, pk_column, source_col)]
    n = len(related_obj_ids)
    i = 1
    for id in related_obj_ids:
      if type(id) != type(0): id = id.id
      params.append(id)
      tables.append('"%s" t%d' % (m2m_table, i))
      where.append('t%d."%s" = %%d' % (i, target_col))
      if i != n:
        where.append('t%d."%s" = t%d."%s"' % (i, source_col, i + 1, source_col))
      i = i + 1
    if specified_only:
      where.append(
        '%%d = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "%s" WHERE "%s" = "%s"."%s")' %           (m2m_table, source_col, meta.db_table, pk_column))
      params.append(n)
    return self.extra(tables=tables, where=where, params=params)

Work - Phone

All officers (commissioned, non-commissioned and academic) in my unit have been issued a cellular slavery device, carrying and answering which is mandatory. Stood half the day in the sun on god forsaken base waiting in line. Turns out their records indicate I'm not an NCO. Flashed shiny new NCO card I got especially for this occasion — no go. Faxed(!) a hard copy (!!) of my record over - all ok (!!!). World class authentication, that is. Seems our systems don't integrate too well with the civilian cell service provider's. At least free calls with colleagues should cut my phone bill in half.

Me - Haircut

Today I went to a barber and had him, besides the haircut, trim my beard, which was growing untouched since December (when I became an NCO and was allowed to grow a beard). I was unhappy with the unkempt look (think al-Qaeda), but I was afraid of change. I think my fear was justified. I hate the result. My consolation is that it seems to have a healthy growth rate, so I'll experiment more. People's reactions are the strangest thing.

FFDB - Quality of Writing

Have you read something that was obviously spell checked but not actually proofread? The way to tell is that all the spelling mistakes and typos are the kind that would fool a dictionary-based spelling checker (meaning they're actual words, just not the right ones, or words that would not appear in a dictionary even when spelled correctly (like proper names) so a person could still click "ignore" and not notice the typo).

Well, fan fiction that regularly misspells the Hogwarts houses and uses non-words like "comon" (as in, "comon dude, let's go") is painful to read, even if it has actual original plot twists (in this fandom?). So I want the FFDB to have a Quality of Writing score for stories. I just need to figure out the scale and how to make it difficult to abuse.

So far I have thought of these possible scores:

• Ready for the printing press
• Multiple editors, multiple passes
• Proofread by a literate human being
• Spell-checked
• Recognizable English
• AOL chatroom transcript

Please contribute!

FFDB/code - design

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Linguistics - Russians

It appears the Russian language has no distinction between "security" and "safety". Does it mean they are very paranoid and attribute all safety-related incidents to sabotage or do they understand the word to mean "protection from harm, caused by negligence or enemy action"? Think of the implications! To me, "safety officer" paints the picture of an anal-retentive civil engineer, and "security officer" of a counter-intelligence style paranoid ex-field agent. But it could also be so that the KGB's purpose would be more ambiguous…

Fandom - Censorship?

There are 131 missing author ids on sugarquill.net. They represent the 131 authors who were deleted, either for technical reasons or for not complying with something. I know of Kokopelli, and of Alec & Teri. I think some other were tossed out with Alec & Teri. Who else? What were the causes? I suspect canon interpretation fundamentalism. Or is this something one does not speak about in polite company?

TV - House 1x12 "Sports Medicine"

Oh, I get it. Cute innocent young doctor dating physically and emotionally crippled obnoxious over-confident (though it's well deserved) old doctor. Of course RJA is all over it.

Movie - "Mean Girls"

I've pirated and watched this movie. I've used keeping up with current trends as an excuse to ogle seventeen year-old starlets playing sixteen year old starlet wannabes.

The movie was bad in a crude humor, overuse of cliches, over the top kind of way, and it was good in a predictable good-vs.-evil kind of way, and it almost made up for it. Like candy that you know is not good for you, but you eat anyway, because your taste buds say "yum!".
The nerdcore was adorable. Ok, that sounded gay. It is cool that nerdcore is getting into mainstream.

It was both sad and predictable that success contributed to the lead actress' personal problems.

From a review of the DVD on Amazon:

If anything, the grownups-especially the school principal, played by Tim Meadows, of whom the picture needs much more-tend to nudge these pushy teen-agers into the wings. The movie, produced by Lorne Michaels and directed by Mark Waters, is often funny, but it was conceived by people who are plainly wiser and more worldly than their target audience, and there's something about that discrepancy that, you know, totally sucks. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

That's the problem with mass entertainment - they have a brilliant anthropological study of contemporary female highschool cliques, and they have to film slapstick comedy to try and make their point. I think it aimed too wide and missed.

Edit, 2006-05-11: I've watched Heathers because most reviews mentioned it. It needs to be watched with an audience and 80s clothes are a huge WTF, but yeah, Mean Girls is definitely a Heathers remake. They exchanged the horror for slapstick trying to retain the black humor, but as I already said it didn't quite work out.

TV - House 1x11 - Detox

I was watching the girlfriend Pam throughout the episode going "who is that?" in my head. And then I clicked through the credits and it's Lilly Kane! She's good looking, and then I see she's more than a year younger than I am! I'm getting old. Did House have a massage or a masseuse? Good acting.

FFDB - Working (Almost) Prototype

So, there's a bunch of pretty bad Python code that encodes the screen-scraped index of a very nice fanfic archive. I wish to fix as many things in the prototype stage. So, while I can fix the Ridiculously Redundant Recording of URLs by myself, I need some help with defining some of the metadata.

1. What is the Correct Way of writing a ship name? Is it Harry/Hermione or Hermione/Harry? Are both ok? Are they the same? What is The Rule? Is it ordered by gender, or focus? What if the entire story is written from an OFC's point of view, should it be Harry/Mary or Mary/Harry? Would Harry marry Mary? I would be very merry should Harry marry Mary! Some people seem to care about such things.
2. How do I map whatever some sites list as a fic's "genre" into something resembling literary genres (obviously, a story may fit more than one)? Because we know that despite being based on Contemporary Fantasy, the fan fiction varies greatly, from (teen-)melodrama to comic, heroic, romantic, erotic and even high fantasy. Some of what is specified in the archives just means mood (fluff, angst) rather than theme and convention (chick lit, legal thriller), which is confusing. All you people with degrees in English and whatever, have any lecture notes about genre studies? Epistemology geeks? (that's you, Ben!)

Edit: I completely forgot all non-prose (though I personally doubt the artistic merit of so called song fics, I am but a plebe and am willing to let history decide), and the vast amounts of farce (intended or not) as well as the token bit of genuine irony. Also, the fandom is an introspective (or just plain antagonistic) bunch and thus we have fan fiction about fan fiction, which lacking a better name, I'll call "arsficia". *snort*

Edit #2: from the findings of a depraved perv:

“This is really a wonderful thing, Harry,” I said, utterly sincerely. I slid my thumb across the tip.

He gave a breathless laugh. “Thanks,” he said. “I like it.”

I don't know why, but I find it very funny.

Life - Passover

I have to say my aunt's kugel rules!

While reading the Wikipedia article on shark jumping, I've clicked to Northern Exposure (that was a good show!) and then Rob Morrow. Did you know he and his wife called their first daughter Tu?

Update

• I've finished reading Glory Season. It was great. He has built a believable world within the constraints he'd set for himself, and the run of the mill plot offsets the intriguing setting admirably. The ending was kind of artificial, and it's a very hard sell, because so few men will read it and so few women read sci-fi. I'm sure I've missed lots of references. Looks like it doesn't have a following online, though to me it just begs for fan fiction (no, I won't attempt to write any). Brin has very professionally skirted around sex, amazingly well actually. R.: The cover has suffered substantial damage, I'm looking into replacement opportunities.
  Edit: procured, at very reasonable price, two personalized and signed beautiful hardcovers directly from author (see author's web page, seems author's wife handles shipping and handling). Am very happy with impulse shopping decision. R. seemed to like hers, making it even better.
• I watch the first season of House M.D. as it downloads, late as usual. It's good. Kudos RJA for watching the good stuff! It's the third series I've followed her, not disappointed yet. I hope I'm not in danger of becoming a little RJA clone, LOL. The rude sarcastic guy everybody hates but must tolerate because he's so competent, does he always have a beautiful soul? Maybe he's just a bastard. Or there might be hope for me yet. Oh, that girl doctor is hot.
• I've watched two episodes of Veronica Mars. It's BH 90210 all over again. rm -rf /mnt/series/veronica_mars
• Watched three episodes of The Unit. rm -rf /mnt/series/the_unit
• Today I've seen a guy walking a furry white Akita. Looked almost like a Samoyed. Great looking dog!
• Since the birthday meme is making the rounds again, I'll let you know I share birthdays with Johnny Carson and Weird Al Yankovic, and both the Parliament of Great Britain and the United Nations General Assembly first convened on that date. Oh, and Brutus killed himself because he has lost a battle to Mark Antony and Octavian. So, a good date over all, I think.
• My Python project has reached a complexity level where it seizes being a hack and requires actual design. That has made it less fun, but I'm struggling through it in the hope of building something useful. What fan fiction archive would you most like to search/filter using better searching and filtering than what they provide? I can make it happen.

Current Events - Elections

I've voted, but I don't really feel like it makes a difference. It feels as if politics is a sham to placate the media/public and evidencing is effectively decided behind the scenes. I really think that.

Coding - Geek

I figure what prevented me from building the ffdb was the need to get the data to play with, so I've decided to crawl archives to get the raw data so I'll have something to show real people I approach in soliciting help. Sounds like a job for Perl and regular expressions, right? I've read my jwz, so I know better. Also, perl is ugly. Python and BeautifulSoup, on the other hand, is… amazing is the only word that seems fitting. I've crawled FFA, and have done great progress in processing and normalizing the data. Of course, my data is the metadata, thus my metadata is the mata-meta-data? Harry Potter is character #1, anyway. LOL.
The interpreter-driven edit-compile-test loop doesn't scale to multi-class modules, and decent ORM is still hard. I have not even begun to contemplate user interface implementation (typical me).

A coworker asked me today how does a jpeg gets sent in an email, since SMTP is a text based protocol. I said: "enlarged by 33.3% via base64 and with the correct mime type, as specified somewhere under rfc822", and he thought I was totally geeking out. I've only remembered the number because I've (re-)read about it recently (in relation to parsing dates), but simply knowing about mime and that there's an rfc is like… in the job description, for a web apps team. I mean, the world doesn't start and end in the JVM, for crying out loud!
I'm way too judgmental of people.

Geek/Work - Women in Industry

I just wanted to say that unlike poor Alice here(alt), my boss has never asked my help with his pr0n, but then I thought about the broader problem of women in programming (or the IT industry, or science & technology in general).

For one thing, over launch a few weeks back, I have tried and failed to explain to a novice (a very wet behind the ears, non-geek, Comp.Sci. grad) what is meant by:

The saddest example of the overly homogeneous work group is the all-male team. Women are obvious victims of the sports analogy: The same male establishment that excluded them systematically from team sports for so long now compounds the felony by insinuating that they're probably bad team players. Of course women function as well on teams as men. Any man who has worked on mixed teams would find it hard to imagine ever again working in the all-male environment. That was our fathers' sad lot.

Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Peopleware 2nd ed, p. 156

For another, today, one of our big design whiteboards showed evidence of immature and inexperienced adolescent males who lack artistic talent discussing breast size preferences. In the room sits a female developer. A very good looking one (shush mom, she's taken). This is not an uncommon occurrence. Oftentimes, the office sounds like a thread on Slashdot, just not as sophisticated (due to the participants' smaller total erudition).

And then we ask why so few females major in computer science.

And the ones who do, turn out to be like Scott Adams' Alice. The joke goes like this: female programmers are like guinea pigs. Why? Well, guinea pigs are neither from Guinea, nor are they pigs.

It's very sad, and I see no way to end this. I'm not alone.

Edit: If anyone cries "sexual harassment", I'd like to say this: Yes, and no. The situation is suboptimal, but we're in the army. It's a thinly veiled patriarchal system populated by teens who are led by people in their early to mid twenties. If the letter of the law was strictly enforced, we'd probably all be in jail. So we don't point fingers, we try not to stare, and mostly the situation does not get out of hand. Did I ever feel uncomfortable for the females present, because of something that was said? Many, many times.
To the Neanderthals who would call me "gay" for thinking like this: date rapists get caught.

EDIT: Added Google Images alternate link to Dilbert comic.

Tech - Be gentle with your laptop

Righteous techie anger is amusing when the spit is not in your face.

Before my project was moved to the IT division, it existed in the main (or rather, first) client's IT department. When main development goals were reached and we have entered the maintenance stage, the client decided our premium treatment was unwarranted and cut our budget, our ability to filter personnel and finally our offices (That's how I found myself in our barrack).
The IT department still uses our cool brand, but since the advent of centralized IT they have no directory, mail, file or database servers of their own — they just manage their own users. Anyway, since we were buddies we've heard their war stories, and I can tell you non-combat officers and company executives are the same, and they ruin laptops just as frequently, just their replacements don't lower their shares' value, they cost the taxpayer money.

Geek - Programming languages and their relationship styles

This is the funniest thing I've read in a while.

Geek - Linux administration for sexual favors

Apparently the software giant recommends this way of hiring sysadmins / getting laid if you're a *NIX nerd.
For the record, I've never been paid in any commercial goods for working on a Linux system. While in highschool, I did take cash for installing and maintaining operating systems from Redmond. I do not wish to do that again.
Also, as a guy completely ruined by feminine fiction, it's a complete turn off for me to think she'll have that expression on her face after the fact.

General - Status Update

I don't remember what I should blog about.

I am frustrated at my new boss, but more at myself, as it is my fault I have him in the first place.

I need to but a new computer, but I can't get myself to either settle for what I'm comfortable spending or spend the cost of what I'm comfortable to aquire.

Thanks to Kokopelli, I've discovered FanFicAuthors.net and am reading through some of its archives. Quality varies, but some of it it very good.

I have been working on a cool but completely pointless project on company time, out of frustration. I'll see about open-sourcing it, as it's very generic and doesn't reveal anything other than the fact we use computers.

Glory Season goes very slowly.

Still can't get myself to do any of the things need doing. It's beginning anything that is so hard - once I get started it's hard to stop. Do any of my readers follow any fanfics? At all? It would be a help if someone answers.

Have been on a trip to Jerusalem. Was surprisingly good. Pics.

Found on the Web - Rollerblade-Barbie

This. is. so. funny!

Computers - Disgruntled LISPer/*NIX hacker

I don't know if it's a joke, but if it is, it is a very well written one: The "Acknowledgements" section of the scsh manual.

BTW, using Scheme for Perlish tasks is… esoteric, to put it mildly.

Life/Politics - Social Issues

I've just called my mom "Mrs. Black". She was raised by her grandma and consequently became a very conservative person, perpetually locked into Victorian morals (fit for an era I claim never existed, like the wild west or the middle ages or the renaissance the way they're pictured in books and movies).

I personally loathe both extremes:

The far left because their dreams go against human nature, for I believe it was the ego that drove ape to become man. People are not equal, and society must allow people to become rich to motivate progress (while also preventing people who do work from starving). Welfare one can live well off is dangerous because many will just not bother to rise above it, and a healthy society would need as many working hands as possible. On many issues, the bleeding hearts are either incredibly naive or incredibly hypocritical, either way does not lend them much political credibility.

The far right are xenophobic reactionaries who are unwilling to accept that maybe the traditional way of doing things is not necessarily best (especially when they think it is what god meant, which is first rate hubris).

What I really hate is righteousness. The belief that you are right and they are wrong, regardless of facts or logic. When people believe instead of thinking, they make mistakes. Those mistakes can vary from overpaying for hype and brand recognition to supporting and participating in holy wars.

I support doubt. I think it is a glorious virtue, for it enables people to resist PR departments and warmongering demagogues.

On a different topic, I hope Ariel Sharon is alive and will recover, despite rumors. Though even the most optimistic people have already buried his political career…

Life - A hug

An only child raised in a family with a practical approach to showing affection (we sacrifice a lot to pay for you, you know we love you), after the age of, say, twelve, I shied away from being hugged. I can't seem to remember why. For this and other reasons I presently know nothing about proper hugs. I know I'm too analytical and socially inexperienced, and I believe my concerns for propriety are misplaced, but nevertheless…

Recently I've met a trainee (our equivalent to freshman chicks). She, well, seems interested in me, or is a very friendly person, because she seeks me out in crowds like the dining hall. The other day she hugged me on the main square, as a greeting, when she saw me. That startled me so much my thoughts keep getting back to it. I was pretty uncomfortable with people around and suddenly forced to decide whether I'm interested or not, because till now, we've only been casually friendly, and here is an invitation to hug her back. Do I take it? A coward like me — of course not. And she does seem to be rather squishy…

Do I have a point? I don't think so.

Movies - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

After reading R.'s book, I'm going to see the movie tomtoday.

A week later: There is an observation I can't remember, I think made by Emperor Hirohito, about the distance between plans and execution. Well, maybe today.

Two weeks after that: I've seen it the previous weekend (half empty theater, mostly kids). I think it's the first movie I've seen where there's more detail in the movie than in the book. The movie is faithful to the source, though expectedly over dramatized, too pretty, and tries to look like LoTR.

The beaver family, as comic relief for the adults, was a bit much. Nobody laughed.

Why does the older girl (Susan) have to be pretty? Isn't the story about average kids? Like movie!Hermione, I think it's OOC.

They say LoTR is very Christian, but it never bothered me. This story does. I think it's because it's a bit more pushy with the evangelism. It's too short, too simplistic, too black-and-white, and the loss of the narrator in the movie hurts: I don't think Peter's development as a character really gets through the silver screen. I've been spoiled by more complicated plots, grayer characters, and less obvious than Sunday-school preaching of morals.

C.S. Lewis < J.K. Rowling < Lois McMaster Bujold

Life/Work - Cobol

This week I've accidentally bumped into G.D. on a bus. Actually, I woke him up when I got too loud at some point in my chat with P.D. on the way back to work. You know how those quiet introverts totally geek out when they talk about their interests? Like that. :-)

I've quizzed him about his new job at BigBankCorp. They are in the process of rewriting their entire IT infrastructure on IBM MF. They've recently switched from Unisys MF, and this costly move was explained as an opportunity to replace their unmaintainable mess of spaghetti COBOL with... brand spanking new unmaintainable mess of spaghetti COBOL. Apparently they don't like Java because they don't like the OO overhead.
Progress in VM and JIT compiler design over the last decade? Never heard of it.
COBOL workforce are getting old, scarce and expensive? No problem!

Apparently, there's a company that signs up comp.sci. grads with no experience (or friends, apparently), gives them three months of training in MF use / applications programming, and then whores them out to banks for two years for very little pay. The people sign up because it's the only way to get MF experience, if you've missed the opportunity to slave for the government during your military service. Thus, my friend is the second most experienced coder on his team, with two whole years in the air force behind him.

So basically, not only are there new installations of IBM z-series, they actually use the legacy environment (none of that Linux stuff for us!), and develop in COBOL (despite thirty five years of progress in software engineering disciplines, Dijkstra and Wirth be damned), but they ruin perfectly good young people along the way. My heart goes out to every one of those misguided souls!
This is not really sarcasm. I love computers, and I pity the people who get into the industry, in these days, to work on that, instead of on something that is, you know, less than 45 years old.

The node on E2 has lots of info (including Dijkstra's excellent quote), but the best is this piece by John Cowan. *shudder*

HP fandom - GoF

The movie opened on Thursday, December 8th. I was beat, and was only able to watch it after the Sabbath. The cinema is located near/in an area with many observant people, so they have to adhere or lose much of their clientele, but I'd really like to be able to go the movies on the weekend. First time I feel that way, as far as I can remember.

The cinema was packed full of kids. I forgot how skewed my thinking of the fandom demographics is. Also, junior-high aged girls wear too much makeup and look disturbingly attractive.

The decorations were good, most of the characters were the way I pictured them. Dombledore was OOC, and Flitwick was made into a sort of mascot or something. The kids' acting wasn't top notch. I enjoyed it through and through, but that is because my expectations were intentionally set very low. It was too dang short and I've missed all the detail from the book. I've read and heard people say the movie was too long and they needed more restroom breaks. Well, don't drink so much overpriced sugar-water!

Voldemort and Moody were good. I need to see it again to say anything more.

Computers - Compiler & Architecture Seminar 2005

Here I'll post about my attendance there, when I stop being lazy.

Computers - Mom

My technophobic mother asked me today how come her work email has two different addresses that both get delivered to the same inbox. She wanted the real answer, not the usual "just some computer stuff, trust me it works" crap. So I've explained about IP and DNS, and explained i-nodes and hardlinking for comparison (including the benefits for caching scenarios). Without using a single technical term, I was able to make it all make sense. Mom rocks.

Life - Three years of my life

Three years ago I was conscripted into service, for a period of three years. Today I was supposed to be discharged. But of course, since I became a code monkey, I have signed a contract obligating me to work for the government for a period of up to two and a half years more. Starting from tomorrow, I'm an NCO. Nothing at all has changed, but now I'll be getting paid (about minimum wage, I've been told).

It should have been a happy day, but it has been completely ruined by the most horrid display of bureaucracy I have seen in my life. I'll be on leave tomorrow to try and salvage what's left of this unique opportunity to celebrate. The clerks cut their day short because of their commander's absence, so I was unable to finish some paperwork, and I was threatened with a court marshal if I don't come to work tomorrow to finish it. I said that if that's the best use of my time the system can imagine, I'll oblige, when I'm back on the day after tomorrow.

I was a very patriotic young man three years ago. Very eager to serve. I was discouraged by the drafting and sorting process, but still believed in the system to volunteer for the training and extra service. Three years of service have led me to the conclusion that the public sector sucks, and every non-combat position in the armed forces should be cut back and privatized. Men and women in service should be paid volunteers, who can be replaced.

Art - Roses in December

Tim Bray frequently plugs University of British Columbia's botanical gardens' Photo of the Day. This time, a beautiful scan of a rose. Notice it's a scan, not a photo.

The fic's not too shabby either, and it even has a quote to attribute the name to Peter Pan's creator. Wasn't the author once a member of a certain thankfully long dead HP community many of my readers are familiar with? I think that penname rings a bell.

Life - Work

This week, this happened. It wasn't that bad. Three hours on buses for a one minute interview and a signature on a piece of paper. But I've seen girls from Shevah-Mofet* on the bus trip back, which mitigates the enormous waste of time, at least a little bit. I figure in a few years, such a statement would label me a pedophile, but I like to watch highschoolers and see if there's any hope of some of them becoming decent adults. By the time I meet them on guard duty, it appears it's usually too late for them to change.

At work, I'm simultaneously being treated like a misbehaving child (I don't like military discipline for the sake of military discipline, and my new project lead takes offence) and pushed into a position of responsibility without too much support. This whole "we can't treat you any differently than any other soldier, but we can demand ten times the output because we've seen you perform" is making me crazy. I've donated three years of my life, now I'm expected to take on more work for the privilege of minimum wage, while the people I'm supposed to train and delegate work to (with no authority whatsoever) are basically laughing at me for being a pushover.

In other new, I've finished "Paladin of Souls". Bujold is very good, but I just don't like romance novels. 4/5

* - supposedly a good high school in Tel Aviv, formed by immigrant Soviet prep school teachers, frustrated of Israeli public education and unable to penetrate the elite to get access to private schools. In Russia, Jews were pressured to excel because of surrounding anti-Semitism, and the state-enforced ethnic quotas on admittance to good higher education. In Israel, where there is no pressure, the liberal/populist "let the kids be" crap has won and education is as bad as in the US.

Life/Writing - Attractive Adjectives

Let me theorize for a second, as I often wont to do. What people usually find attractive in the opposite sex (I don't understand same-sex attraction, therefore I'll refrain from commenting about it) are the distinguishing features of that sex. Meaning attractive women are womanly and attractive men are manly. Thus men are attracted to breasts because they don't have any (that's my theory anyway), and round buttocks, and despite recurring fashion for men to wear their hair long, long flowing hair. Generally, curvier and rounder features, and a non-intimidating size (or maybe that's just me). Women are (supposedly) attracted to tall, broad-shouldered, muscled men with more squarish features (and possibly more body hair). And of course, kind eyes, or a giant throbbing erection (just for her!), whatever the case may be.

That's all pretty simple and generally well understood, at least by people who are weird like me and like to overanylize life instead of just living it. What I don't understand is the use of "calloused hands" as an attractive attribute of men. I don't think the feeling would be pleasing, and unless the guy is in Oxford crew, it would almost certainly mean working-class. Why is that attractive? Or does it simply mean unprofessional, not thought-out, copy-paste writing? I do speak of fan fiction, after all.

Life - A year since I've lost a friend

Today was one year since Genya died. I was unable to attend because of the army, but my parents went. They are both very traumatized by that, much more than I am. They say I appear in some of the pictures (his Bar-Mitzvah, etc.) His parents aged a lot in one year.

Don't drink and drive, people.

Books - Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson - The Butlerian Jihad (Legends of Dune, Book 1)

My excuse or touching this: I was on guard duty and it was the only dead tree book I had available (on loan). A PDA sounds very tempting now, if only to avoid being stuck with that again.

I have read about 150 pages out of the ~700 total. I do not intend to wade through the rest to find out how it ends. It had a feeling of being either written by a sophisticated multithreaded Markov-esque machine regurgitating unrelated sci-fi cliche stories each targeted at a specific target market sector in a round-robin manner, or of something taken off FFN and miraculously proofread. It just didn't sound like professional (I won't bother with "best-selling") writing. And it appears I am not alone in this thinking: the hardcover edition is being sold on Amazon for less than the mass market paperback!

Some reviews say it would've been a good enough book had it not the pressure of the original Dune to drive it into the ground (sand?). I maintain that I see no reason to read junk, unless you specifically enjoy reading/MST-ing junk. And there is definitely no reason to endorse it by paying for it, even then.

Frank should have put a codicil in his will saying his son would lose the rights to the name should he use it for publishing crap.

Personal - Ill

I have the flu. Almost a week now, and although I think I'm recovering, it's very slow. Symptoms are mostly headache and fever (upto and including 38.5°C), when I'm not all drugged up. Got a single day of sick leave (yay). I'm self-medicating the top rated quotes from bash.org. Recommended to persons not offended by swear words.

Life - Updates

• Our new guy is a CS major from TAU. He has graduated together with two of my buddies from school. He's also dated a girl from my class in school.
• A guy who has enlisted (got drafted, whatever) on the same day with me and has been with me through half the training and then flunked and served one floor below as a tech got quietly discharged more than a full month before his due date. I barely had the time to say goodbye. Lucky SOB.
• Found out I was being ripped off by the national telco and ISP for a year. Phoned them and got six times more bandwidth for half the price. My advice: follow the price changes, and demand to be on the better programs, since they obviously won't upgrade you by themselves.
• I've noticed how my work as a coder is slowly spoiling my love for hacking. Doing it under time pressure, with arbitrary constraints, in a room with people I don't like, with a tight-ass PHB running around and sputtering nonsense really takes the fun out of this thing I enjoy doing. So much so, that I've found I haven't been inclined to pursue this at home for a while. Makes me really pity adult movie actors. T.S. has recommended to just say "screw with this" and hack for fun to get the feeling back. I have vowed to never work in an outfit that will give me this feeling — the army is one thing, but on the free market, I'm willing to sacrifice some pay so I won't have to dread mornings/Sundays.
• My department was moved out of our nice offices and into a shack. We've pained it and we've got new furniture for it and a new gigabit switch and they keep saying it'll be fine, but it won't be the same. I need some posters for decoration.
• Stupid, criminally incompetent, should've been shot, lazy-ass @#$%&^*!s in [censored] have [censored] our [censored] [censored] right during [censored] and of course the [censored] is not [censored] so our [censored] are [censored]. I'm glad I'm not the one there right now [censored] it, but I can't help with feeling useless because I can't do anything about it. But that's probably like "secret" or something…
• I'm seriously considering buying a computer, because my mom wants my old one. It would be a 3000+ (Venice) on AN8 Ultra (NF4U) with 1G Geil PC3200 CL2.5 and a 6600 (or I might shell out for a 6600GT). It's cheap and sounds great, but the cooling must be seriously considered.

Books - Lois McMaster Bujold - The Curse of Chalion

A spoiler-free review of Lois McMaster Bujold's first good Fantasy novel!

So, as everyone who reads my blog knows already, it's so totally awesome. Thank you very much R. for making me read it.

• A world where prayer is actually answered, and every lay man is entitled to at least one miracle, is either really cool or just as the same as ours, depending on one's POV, I guess.
• I liked how theologians are the wizards of this world, though for the men who are not god-touched, it could be plain medieval Europe. A very light use of fantastic elements, all considered.
• I loved the language, and how it served its purpose instead of being the purpose.
• Umegat trying to debauch a dedicat by making her read Boccaccio aloud was funny.
• The hero appears to be designed to be fallen in love with by the reader, but I can't bring myself to dislike him none-the-less. Bujold is good like that.
• The book does start slow, but it picks up its pace and gets to the point where you can't put it down midway through. The ending was a surprise for me.

If you were a dedicat of one of the Chalion gods, which god would you choose? There's no shame in choosing by color, mind, but a theological reason is preferred.

Life - A day and a year older

Another house point (pray tell, which house?) to the first person to correctly identify which book I'm reading for my birthday:

[snip] did smile at him—that was true, he did not delude himself. And she was kind. But she smiled at and was kind to her horse, too. Her honest friendly courtesy was hardly ground enough to build a dream mansion upon, let alone bring bed and linens and try to move in. Still… she did smile at him.

Is it a bad sign, that I find a love-struck protagonist… charming?

Life - Cameraphone

Procrastination is when it takes one two months since getting a new mobile phone to buy it a data transfer cable.
My excuse: the Motorola C650 has a USB "Mini-B" receptacle, which should match a USB "Mini-B" plug at the end of a USB cable (on the other end of which is a USB "A" plug that goes to the host system, usually a computer). I say, what's the use of the USB standard when a bleeping Engineering Change Notice invents a new bleeping connector and forces me to go and buy a new bleeping cable? I dare you to shop for a "Mini-A to A" USB cable! No retailer carries those. Motorola's own accessories shop is currently out-of-stock!* They're supposed to come with the device, because they're as rare as a proprietary connector! Just as costly too. I guess with the service providers giving away the phones for next to nothing, the aftermarket business is where the money's at.

So, after checking online and in two photo-accessories and one cellphone-accessories shops, I've finally found it, all nicely packaged in a little black bag, in a computer-enthusiasts shop in downtown. Between case-modding and watercooling equipment and a GeForce 7800 SLI kit. 27 New Israeli Shekels (under $6 US).

You may wish to check my fotki page for new stuff, or I might just move over to flickr.

* - Never you mind that actually using the cable requires one to buy proprietary third party software which Motorola doesn't support. Moto4Lin is free, simple, takes 58k, is available in portage, and works. Thank you, Dima from Ukraine.

Found on The Web - Visions of Science Photographic Awards

via /.; a bunch of beautiful (and educational!) shots can be found on this site.

Movie - Serenity

Tickets to the only screening in Israel were sold out three days in advance. Lucky I had the sense to get the tickets in time, though unfortunately I didn't manage to arrange for more than one friend to come along. Screening it at 23:45 wasn't very smart of the ICon management.

Great movie, and the Firefly marathon afterwards was fun. Getting back home at 05:45 wasn't, but that's what holidays are for.

The audience was full of Firefly fans. Lots of cheers and clapping, lots of laughter at all the right places, even the jokes from the beginning that were spoiled by the trailers. The whole film was very funny, not just Kaylee's "batteries" and "I'm gonna live" lines (which were great). I think in the dialogue between Mal and Book ( - Mal: "You'll have to tell me about that someday." [meaning Book's history] - Book: "No, I don't.") Mal represents the fans.

It being a Whedon production, lot's of chicks: Zoë, Inara, Kaylee and River are all hot (and dangerous). If Kaylee discovers she's a lesbian in a later episode/movie, I won't be surprised at all. And those "this one time at band camp…" lines? Please, once in five years is enough.

I've met only two people I know at ICon, besides <lj user="grayswander"/> who went with me. Where were all the geeks I know, huh?

People, if you haven't seen Serenity, you owe it to yourselves to go see it.

Life - "School" Trip

My entire outfit went on a trip to improve intra-departmental integration and boost morale. More than six months after the merger (a hostile takeover, more like) the logistics and personnel people are still not really integrated, since they still mostly don't actually work with each other (yet).

It was two days in the north including:

1. Playing treasure hunt in Ramat Hanadiv Memorial Gardens
2. Kayaking in Kfar Blum
3. Partying in some club in Qiryat Shemona
4. Wading through the balls-freezing waters of Nahal Snir (Hatzbani) trying not to break our necks on the dangerous rocks.
   Highly recommended, provided you have sturdy shoes that won't come off in water and medics at the ready.
5. More partying on the Gai Beach in Tiberias

Fun was had by all, considering the twenty-ish average age and high number of females (for an IT outfit, anyway), even the unlucky female developer who (while inebriated) had landed badly on the dance floor and fractured something in her foot.

I've met a youngish Buffy-fan chick who sang songs from "Once More, with Feeling" and can't wait for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (both at ICon*).

Is it just me, or did anyone else notice a similarity between Willow Rosenberg and Luna Lovegood?

*—House points to the first person to find me in the pictures and post a comment.

Humor - Secretaries

Today's Dilbert shows Carol the Secretary telling Dilbert she'd date him for four trillion dollars, despite being happily married. My department's secretary is single, but somehow I think it would be about the same, if only she knew about numbers that big. I'd rather go for one of the female developers, them being as a rule smarter and hotter, but currently the point is moot. I think it's time to update my geek code.

TV - Lost, Season 2, Episode 3

Just watched the episode.

I understand the main metaphor about believeing whether pressing the button means saving the world as the same rift as described by Pirsig between the classic and romantic understanding. And it all sounds like psychobable, unless someone like RJA would like to explain what they mean.

TV - Alias Season 05 - Episode 01: Prophet 5

Like RJA said, the episode was surprisingly good. I'll keep watching.

Work - New Year's

For the third time in my department, the smart, dependable, funny, pretty girl is too good for us and leaves for officer's training. It is very sad to lose E.C, and I hope she'll get a decent assignment.

I got First Sergeant two weeks early, for the Jewish new year. Considering the 16 hours long work days and working on the weekend, it really is the least they could've done.

Hurt my finger on the Uzi's magazine holding thingy. Still scored 100% day/night and 12 dead (simulated) Arabshostiles. Yeah, in the IDF, even the software developers are tough! ;-)

Work/Life - Down again

It's true that it's the little things that affect one's mood.

During my night shift I've left a poor impression on an interesting female colleague. I feel like I have no influence on my room. My boss and I disagree about schedules and the exact nature of my job. A friend whom I've met in training is getting discharged because his outfit can't afford him and for the next two years he'll be earning roughly three times more than I'll be earning comes December.

Is aimlessly reading about Prosody a waste of my time?

Life - Moving

Tomorrow I'll be moving about a kilometer north-west, and consequently won't have internet access for a few days. Here's hoping the move will be as painless as possible!

Edit: Well, I had internet the next morning, hurray for the national telco provider. Everything is more or less alright.

Oh, and now that the money is back in the bank where it belongs, I can say I've seen close to a hundred thousand US dollars in cash. Looked like a drug deal right out of a Hollywood movie. Wacko Russians!

Hardware Shopping - Dual Core!

Dual core is all the rage now, and with AMD's entry-level dual core processor killing the competition, one can buy one heck of a machine for quite a reasonable price, when you think about it.

part	make & model	US price	US price in ILS	IL price in ILS	markup
cpu	AMD Athlon 64 X2 (939) 3800+ 2x512KB	365	1678.21	2250	34.07%
mobo	MSI nForce4 Ultra (939) K8N Neo4 Platinum	125	574.73	840	46.16%
ram	OCZ/Corsair/Kingston 2x512MB PC3200 CL2.5	90	413.81	780	88.49%
video	XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB	150	689.68	1050	52.25%
hdd	Western Digital SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar SE	85	390.82	470	20.26%
total		815	3747.24	5390	43.84%
exchange rate	USD to ILS	1	4.59784

Prices in US are rounded up and include shipping & handling, and don't use rebates (20$ and 25$ mail-in rebates are available). Prices in Israel include 17% VAT.

I chose AMD over Intel because of price/performance, but if Intel's hardware virtualization technology lives up to its hype (together with the rest of the cool new stuff that comes in the designed-in-Israel due-in 2006 next-gen Intel chips), I might reconsider.

Personally, I'd want to get a motherboard with integrated graphics (a GeForce 6150 + nForce 430 based solution sounds promising) because those 1000NIS on a a video card I'm not going to use are bugging me.

Compared to last time I did this, I've upgraded to CL2.5 RAM and swapped a WD for the Seagate hard drive because of availability issues.

We are still being ripped off on RAM.

Work - @#$%^&!

I don't want to name names, but yesterday I've had a surreal experience that exemplifies how badly IT projects are run and why I think it's a disgrace and a waste of money and why a project my outfit working on is going to fail. Again.

As part of my training I've interviewed a development team from a neighboring project. The team lead was a female coder promoted to officer to hide the fact she's a bad developer. Naturally, she became an even worse team lead. The team members themselves are all very inexperienced and have very naive notions about how stuff works in real life, especially concerning QA (especially unit, integration, system and acceptance testing), SCM, performance benchmarking, verifying scalability, deployment, user training, support, debugging in a production environment, maintenance, etc (basically everything other than churning out bad code). They all live in this dream where they release a version 1 in December, when what they had to show me looks nowhere near anything I'd show a client as "ready for release". To find out how bad it really is, I've turned to the systems people: I've managed to interview G.B., who is a team lead of a dedicated group of DBAs who support the project. We've shared war stories like one DBA to another, and man, she has revived my faith in females in IT. The place is full of great people, if only the fucked up institution could inspire them all to work!

Every time I think I'm too much of a "Rosh Gadol" for my job description and how big the gap between what I'm supposed to be responsible for and what I feel responsible for, I get the feeling I was wrong to decline officer training and yet I still believe I'm not the right person to be a great officer (INTJs are simply not leaders. I'd want to strangle people who are slacking, and that's not allowed). Problem is, it might've been better for me and my outfit if I were one. I'll see, maybe I'll change, maybe the environment will change.

God, how I hate "Rosh Katan" people who don't care about their craft!

On a completely unrelated note: E.P. has invited me to his birthday, day after tomorrow. I can't believe how excited I am! Don't have a clue about a present, though.

Books - Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

So, I've read it a while ago and never reviewed. But first of all, let's establish my bias: Not only am I a depressed overly talkative introvert, I'm a fascist as well. I've known it for a while, I get it from me mom. I don't like people who like to avoid work (and especially people who boast about it, a very trendy thing to do in modern day Israel) and I don't like stupid people. I'm working on the latter, as I realize why I'm wrong to do that.

Personally, I have zero experience with autistic kids. Any modern book about the subject must stress they are no worse than any other kid: they can grow to become productive members of society, all they need is love and patience, like any other child. That's all great, and the lesson "if you try hard enough, you can be anything" is important in encouraging children to apply themselves in school etc., but I disagree with the conclusion about the kid himself, as I understand it from the book.

The kid fantasizes about all normal people dying and he having the world to himself, never again being forced to interact with human beings. He carries a knife and pulls it on people seemingly at any available opportunity. He has no respect for police officers or authority of any kind, if he feels he is in the right. He has no compassion for human beings, as creatures who possess a soul and the right to live, but rather treats them like computers that walk. He taught himself A-level math.

I don't know how his arrested social development is connected to normal hormonal changes during puberty (if any), but he's supposed to be fifteen and has shown no interest in girls (or boys, for that matter). I don't know if he'll grasp the intricacies of courting, but I foresee problems on that front, as no one can explain for him in detail what constitutes "sexual harassment" these days - it can be anything, depending on the other person's feelings, a concept he doesn't quite grasp.

I guess that years of kind and firm treatment with a psychologist can help him improve his social skills, and he probably can do well in some scientific endeavor (though mathematicians working alone is a rare thing indeed these days, Andrew Wiles being the exception that proves the norm), but I think he's a disaster just waiting to happen. I can't help but feel sorry for his parents, adulterous as they may be, for at least they qualify for "human". Am I heartless?

Another thing is that I noticed I share some of my nerdier qualities with the main character. For example, he disaproves of euphemisms for the same reason I do. I think it is a warning to us nerds: behave, or people will treat you like they treat autists. And no, simulating asperger-syndrome is not cool, and does not make you a hacker.

Work - More ranting

So, free training. Two years after initial training all coders get an upgrade where they learn about architecture. Actually, the idea is to try and make the coders think outside their projects, technologies and environments and learn broadly about modern IT. Among other activities there are introductory lectures on topics like n-tier, UML, interpersonal communication, database tuning, datawarehousing, design patterns, networks, QA, SOA, dotNET vs. Java, ERP, storage with backup & recovery, security and lots of others. Three weeks total, by the best consultants available. A bloody dream come true for anyone wishing to get any sort of clue about the industry.

The first lecture was given by Eyal Rubin (I think that's the name; anyway, he's a big boss there or something) from 2Train4. Right at the start he got so many blank stares the level very quickly dropped to kindergarten. He had to review OOP, TCP/IP, RDBMS… very, very basic stuff. Someone asked what's a proxy. People didn't know about the existence of stored procedures. He used euphemisms for HTTP, XML, SOAP, SOA to avoid using the terminology after he had to explain "port 80". It took him a while to explain "application server" and how come scalability is not always linear. I was so ashamed I took off my pin.

I know about the five different worlds, and I realize that hadn't I been a huge computer geek, I wouldn't have known about EJB's either, but some of that stuff was covered in the initial training! A bloody TCP socket, for crying out loud, and SELECT statements! Gah.

Work - Need to vent

Our new resource turned out to be a big fat "no hire" with no skill set, a big head and an attitude problem. The guy has never seen any OOD in his life, has no respect for coding standards, no experience in team work, no understanding of PC hardware, doesn't know what "K&R" or "Stroustrup" are. Basically, he lacks all skills the company paid for.

But my main problem is that his motivation for getting the job was completely different from the rest of us: You see, he is fit for combat duty. So, nearing the end of his senior year of high school (when he was already a full year older than his peers, for reason unknown), he had several choices:

1. Enlist, serve three years in infantry, armor or artillery.
2. Go to college, get a degree, serve six years as an engineer (three years paid).
3. Stay in school for an extra year, get an associate degree, serve four to five years (a year or two paid).

He probably decided real military service is for suckers and college is hard, so what kind of associate degree to get? Mechanics, electronics, software. "Computers" sounds like "money", so a year later here he is.

Now, his goal successfully met, he has no motivation to work hard or learn anything.

And his fucking Israeli attitude! @#$%^&*!

Personal - Being late

I have noticed that every time I meet R.Y. while commuting I am… shall we say "not at my best"? I wondered why is that. So I figure: we only meet on a bus at a time that means I'm very late, so it usually means I've tumbled out of bed and into my uniform in under ten minutes.
It's interesting though that my poor state doesn't bother me otherwise. Maybe I should readjust my answers on that meme to get "dork" instead of "geek".

Books - Edward E. "Doc" Smith - Galactic Patrol (Lensman Series Book #3)

So, I've read somewhere that it was among the first, defining works of the Space Opera genre. I got curious. All I've go to say after reading it is thank God it's not 1937. I have never read a fanfic, not on FFN, not even intentionally bad fanfic, that was this horrible. I can hardly call it a proper novel. The very outdated technology and nomenclature was bad enough ("ray guns", "ether"? WTF!), but the over-the-top depiction of absolutely everything, the non-existent characterization, and Gary Stu hero, a notable lack of morals and disregard for human life really made it hard to believe it was a published work (a bestseller?), not something scribbled in a bored 4th grader's note book. The worst parts were the blatant racism and sexism: worship of classical idealized Arian God-like build and features (a seven foot tall blue-eyed blonde male whose body is described by a male narrator, in a male leading character's words, speaking to an obviously intended male reader, as "beautiful") and the stated as truism belief of the narrator that women are inherently feeble minded and are only good for treating the wounded, recreation and procreation. I've wanted to stop reading so many times, but I've kept on to try and see if it got any worse. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that it had, indeed, got worse.

Of purely historical interest nowadays. Avoid if possible, read with caution.

Books - Terry Pratchett - Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, Book 6)

So, the promised review. I've read the Hebrew translation (that's what I had with me), without reading the original before or after (I might yet). I've managed to reverse translate some of the jokes, but still I didn't laugh nearly as much as I remember laughing while reading The Colour of Magic. Partly it's because a peculiarity of mine: while reading or especially watching comedic situations, I often feel embarrassed for the "fool" instead of laughing at him. Thus I didn't laugh too much at Magrat's naïvete or Granny Weatherwax's imposing personality. Reading the reviews I've noticed I've missed some (most?) of the Shakespearian jokes. Gytha Ogg is brilliant ("Three marriages and an adventurous girlhood had left Nanny Ogg with thigh muscles that could crack coconuts"). That's it.

Life - A weekend on base

Last Thursday, fifteen minutes before end of the work week, a guy who is in charge of arranging the duty shifts / rotation calls and says I must stay for the weekend because they really need me and they're very sorry It's on such a short notice and they'll compensate me later. The notice was indeed short — I was already "late for duty" by hours and needed many more to get home and take things for the weekend and get back. So they decided the need was grave and I won't go home. Instead my parents can bring me items I might need¹.

Ridiculous, but an order is an order and thus, I've spent the weekend with some old and new friends. Everything but the weather was great - the guys (people brought laptops and guitars!), the CO ("I don't like to do the paperwork, can we pretend I didn't catch you asleep and you'll stay awake for two more hours?"), the girls (I took guesses at their data, will check Monday how I did), even the notorious cooking (compensated by local take-out joints being open 24/7). We eventually got so tired from the heat and humidity I beat a guy at chess who in usual circumstances would wipe the board with me.

A girl, all of one month in the service behind her (one day out of bootcamp), didn't handle third watch too well (Why go to sleep while there are friends around to talk to? Because you don't share a watch with those friends meaning your sleep cycles aren't in sync, but of course you have to stop being a teenager for a moment to get this) and whined to the CO about being too sleepy on the third night. He took pity and so I got to fill in for her.

She realized she has done something not nice and to appease her conscience (her own words) brought me vending machine coffee and snack bars at around 4AM, claiming insomnia. We end up sitting there talking until dawn and the end of the shift. What's interesting is that instead of the oversized dirty field uniform she wore short, tight, black somethings with more lacy under-somethings in sight. Also she was playing with her hair and rocking back and forth, showing decent amount of cleavage.

I kept my distance, playing the perfect listener and gentleman, letting her tell me a condensed account of her life ages ten to eighteen, and pretending not to notice anything, thinking she didn't need me to be a guy, but two hours later, with first light, the magic gone and we departing in different directions, I realized that maybe she was hitting on me and I was a giant prat for not even taking a phone number², especially since I had the perfect legit reason — to read her her own file off the computer at the office³.

1 - Z.L. has immediately lent me two books he had with him. Book review posts to follow.

2 - or ICQ UIN? What is it that I'm supposed to ask for these days?

3 - For reasons unknown (Well… I can guess, but that would be a really long digression), the military don't tell people how well they tested, and thus everyone feels obligated to get this otherwise completely uninteresting information through black market channels and longish chains of friends-of-friends).

Life - Updates

I've found out (thanks to T.S.) that the military has accepted a plea we (mostly D.Z. and N.K.) filed two years ago about our signing for extra six months of enlisted service being illegal (though they never bothered to tell us). It means I'll be discharged in January '08 instead of July '08, and more importantly I'll get my first real paycheck in January '06. It will be minimum wage I think, but that's ten times more than what I get now!

I got tired of my trusty old Nokia 5120 and replaced it with a Motorola C650. I like Nokia better, but this one had a camera. I'm still learning to use it. It's so bloody children-oriented and the interface is so flashy. It looks unprofessional!
I don't believe I'm typing this, what am I, forty?

I've downloaded episodes of West Wing. It's not bad at all.

My boss' boss' boss and her boss were replaced today/tomorrow (scheduled, not sudden). We'll see how we like the new people.

Today, very suddenly, a new guy was added to my team. He's fresh out of training and we don't know yet how good is he or whether he likes computers/software.

HP Fandom - Wahlee's "This Moment" H/G fluff

I consider Emily a friend, and I loved her previous writing and completely agreed with her in all those shipping wars I didn't really participate in, and I find nothing wrong with the story (except the typography, which I'm sure is not her fault and will be promptly fixed). But after HBP I just want to say Ginny-Sue is, if not strictly OOC, plain dull. Jo didn't tell us, even through the eyes the worst narrator ever, what Ginny is like, except that she appears to be Fred and George's female third twin and is probably good at snogging. We don't really know if her feelings for Harry are any deeper than her celebrity crush from years past. We don't know what she and Harry talk about during their lake-side excursions (if at all). We don't know she loves him and anticipates his idiotic behavior, or why she does something so atypical and quietly accepts it. All we know is that Harry was physically attracted to her and appreciated her unsophisticated sense of humor, and later was happy dating her. So what? Maybe Harry, being depraved of human touch the way he is (thanks to his loving family), needed the kind of relationship Ron had with Lavender, got exactly that from Ginny, and unlike Ron, was deliriously happy about it? Maybe they just talk Quidditch all the time. Maybe the first thing he did was checking whether she's a real redhead. Maybe I'm being stupid and need to go to sleep.

Overanalyzing - How it all began

Or, at least, my best guess is Walt Disney cartoons are partly to blame. When I was six, I used to watch the Sunday morning cartoons with my parents on our new (well… new to us, it being bought from friends who have emigrated to the US) color TV and I remember my favorite show for a while had been Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers and my favorite character was (of course) Gadget Hackwrench.

For those who don't remember: link #1, link #2.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Management

In accordance with Ariel Sharon's plan to leave settlements in Gaza and the West Bank (what a stupid name! But I guess "Judea and Samariya" reveal it to be Jewish land and that's an inconvenient truth these days), the armed forces are in "emergency mode". Thus, some IT systems have been deemed "critical" and cannot go down, ever.
There's an underground war-room-style damage control center with walls covered by big screen maps of communication networks and traffic-light colored status boards. The room is manned around the clock by nervous, sleepy officers (some running on pure caffeine, some are in their third trimester) who are in charge of making sure nothing breaks or fix it before any one notices it broke and then make sure it never breaks again.

In a dimly lighted corner of the room, very important to the story but completely disregarded by everyone else, slacks a well camouflaged software developer turned cheap yet unreliable phone answering machine sitting a twelve hour shift, unmoving, waiting for a phone call that will never come, announcing something important broke and several room-fulls of monitoring equipment never noticed. Blended into his environment, his presence goes completely unnoticed by the war-room's proper inhabitants who forget to act like responsible officers completely on top of the situation and revert to the developers and techs they were a decade ago, not-quite-adults with baby sitters to arrange and chicken-and-egg logistical problems to solve.

Here's a good example of crisis in IT-land: Person A must have item B to be able to leave place C, which he must do to be effective. Item B is located in Place D, some four hours drive from place C and cannot be taken out until it is properly signed off by said Person A, who cannot reach it because he needs it to be able to leave place C. Something must give for the situation to be resolved, namely a set of orders or policy, but that becomes a point of pride for the brass issuing those orders, for if your orders can be waived in favor of someone else's orders, you are obviously less important.

As I watched wise old men with many years of experience in the field (meaning they know shit about current systems) mediate and judge deeply technical issues guided by very little factual knowledge, uncertain advice, caution gained by experience and rules of thumb gleaned from mistranslations of the US military and IT press, I've thought how much I don't want to get promoted to a position where I won't have time to get into the technical details and have to rely on video-conferences with "a boy"* to get a guesstimate on time to reboot a network appliance or help with pivoting some data from SQL Server using Excel. Instead I wished I could be that boy - the one they know is reliable and knows his stuff.

* - they mean "kid", but Semitic languages are chauvinistic. The proper word, "G.I" or "rating", is treated as derogatory.

I have for two years been contemplating a filk tentatively titled "I am the very model of a modern Project Manager", but alas, my rhymes leave much to be desired. I hoped this latest experience would provide inspiration, but my hopes have been shattered to bits upon my active vocabulary's rocky shore.

Life - My God! Genius! Interest improves quality!

I have been talking to anyone who would listen, trying to phrase my ideas about how the world is so fucked up because people don't do what they like. That because people are unmotivated by what they do for money they do it badly. I see it all the time and it looks like the cause of so much grief, and I'm not the only one because all the smart people I talk to agree with me (and not just to get me to shut up), and it's not just in the military or just in Israel, it's everywhere. It's nothing new, Pirsig talks about it, but just catching up on Paul Graham's latest essay I cried out "you've read my mind!". The question is: How can I make a difference? And I'm not ready to start a startup now, nor will I able to for the next three years. Damn.

Found on The Web - Bad Writing

It's so bad, it's good. Better than reading FFN! The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2005 Results.

Pop Culture - Serenity

Ooh, I've seen the trailer for Serenity (a.k.a "Firefly - The Movie"). I wanna go see it!

Coding - Topological Sort and Depth-First Search

So, I've actually stumbled into some code at work where I need to implement a topological sort for dependencies. And I've read about DFS and stuff, googled a bit and even opened a real comp-sci textbook we have at the office. While all I really needed was Wikipedia! And I'm prototyping in JavaScript like some microsoftie instead of in Python like real l33t h4x0rz! Oh, the shame!

Anyway, this is what I've come up so far:

Array.prototype.shuffle = function(p_nTimes) {
    if (isNaN(p_nTimes) || (p_nTimes <= 0) || (this.length < 2)) return;
    while (p_nTimes--) {
        var i = Math.floor(Math.random() * this.length);
        var j = Math.floor(Math.random() * this.length);
        var t = this[i];
        this[i] = this[j];
        this[j] = t;
    }
};

function item(p_strName, p_arrDeps) {
    this.Name = p_strName;
    this.arrDeps = p_arrDeps;
    this.bIsInStack = false;
    this.bHasBeenVisited = false;
};

function create_deps(p, k) {
    var deps = {};
    for (var i = 0; i < p; i++) {
        var curr = new item(i, []);
        for (var j = 0; j < i; j++)
            if (Math.floor(Math.random() * 100) % k == 0)
                curr.arrDeps.push(j);
        curr.arrDeps.shuffle(p);
        deps[curr.Name] = curr;
    }
    return deps;
};

function print_deps(deps) {
    for (var i in deps) {
        document.write(deps[i].Name + ': ');
        for (var j = 0; j < deps[i].arrDeps.length; j++)
            document.write(deps[i].arrDeps[j] + ', ');
        document.write('<br/>\n');
    }
    document.write('<br/>\n');
};

function topo_sort_dfs_short_circuit_on_cycle(o) {
    var list = [];
    var cycle = null;

    for (var i in o) {
        (function(p) {
            if (p.bIsInStack) cycle = p.Name;
            if (cycle != null) return;
            p.bIsInStack = true;
            if (!p.bHasBeenVisited) {
                p.bHasBeenVisited = true;
                for (var idxDep = 0; idxDep < p.arrDeps.length; idxDep++)
                    arguments.callee(o[p.arrDeps[idxDep]]);
                list.push(p.Name);
            }
            p.bIsInStack = false;
        })(o[i]);
        if (cycle != null) break;
    }

    return [cycle, list];
};

Next step is trying to see whether a non-recursive implementation is faster (yes, I benchmark JavaScript) and then STL. C# I'll do on company time (haven't installed mono yet).

HP Fandom - HBP

Warning: Spoilers ahead. Obviously.

So. Canon. At last. Again. It was kind of a disappointment, how "in character" everything was. Dumbledore is a secretive, overbearing, scheming old fool. Snape, no matter what his true motives are, is a right bastard with a flare for hating incompetence. Hermione is big-headed, Ron is a five year-old, Ginny is a smaller, though by no means less dangerous, version of Gred & Forge, and Harry is Conan The Barbarian in training. Oh, and Voldemort is Koschei the Immortal (if Jo hasn't read some Slavic mythology or folk tales, I'll eat my hat).

Compared to the good fic I've read, it was positively dull. Harry getting together with Ginny? Boring. Harry wants to split with Ginny? Boring. New Minister for Magic is a politician? Boring. The tiny magical community is unashamedly nepotistic? Boring. Most teenage girls, like most teenage boys, are stupid? Boring.
The only marginally interesting character in the whole bunch was Draco Malfoy, and seeing him only through Harry's twisted perception of the universe we don't know anything (good for fanfic, I guess). I'm willing to buy RJA's theory, but in any case I've lost my sympathies for the main characters.
Oh, self appointed Champions-Of-JKR: Tonks r0x, Lupin r0x, and together they snog, not fall asleep! BTW, I still wish for Honks as it makes for more interesting stories.

ETA: Seeing as this is the only negative review I've read, I feel I must say I don't think the book was bad, just that the anticipation was better than the thing itself, which is a known effect. Also, I probably wasn't in the best mood when reading it (on guard duty), so I'll re-read it and see how I feel then. I can only remember two times I've laughed (though not why, in either case), does it seem right?

Personal - Reading

Here I'll write what I thought about "A Mote In God's Eye".

Thanks to wikipedia I've found out I'm a straight-edge (the abstinence, not the music) slacker. Isn't being an over-educated underachieving web surfer fun?

Personal - Beat [adj. informal]

I've had a difficult few days (and nights) at work (my fault, but still) and friday I had a checkup with my orthodontist. Anyway, while reading a book I had this "I'm too tired to follow what's going on" feeling, turned off the PC and went to sleep. I don't usually turn off the PC, but sometimes when it's not doing anything I want silence at nights. I woke up at 15:02, looked at the watch and thought "No wonder I was so tired, I probably stayed up till morning…" and then "No way! The light was still up in the living room!" so this is from /var/log/messages:

Jul 15 23:56:50 tux syslog-ng[8579]: syslog-ng version 1.6.8 going down
Jul 16 15:09:56 tux syslog-ng[8820]: syslog-ng version 1.6.8 starting

Personal - On and Off line

Items dispatched on 15 Jul 2005:
Delivery estimate: 22 Jul 2005

    * 1 of: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) [Children's Edition]

It's going to be a busy week at work, so I might just survive being offline and spoiler-free. I wasn't really nervous about the book at all, up until today. Now I can't wait. Brushing up on classic SF instead.

Personal/Tech - Developer vs. Secretary mode

The first thing I do when I sit in front of (or connect remotely to) a Windows box with intention to accomplish some work, I:

1. Disable intrusive themes, sounds, animated mouse cursors, heavy wallpapers.
2. Enable showing folder path in title and statusbar, showing file extensions, showing hidden and system files, and managing html files and associated folders independently of each other.
3. Set file name and folder name completion key to tab (9) in command processor settings in the registry, so I can use the command line interface.
4. Disable all shortcut keys to accessibility options.

Only then can I get to getting things done. If I happen to be logged as someone else, I usually take care to make sure the person knows what I've done and can reverse it (if they so choose). But sometimes, I just say I refuse to work for free on such a hideously misconfigured computer.
For some reason, people who've observed me doing it (and heard what I had to say about the machine's users while I was doing it) think I'm not just condescending but weird.

Why do I call a cutesy configured computer, optimized for avoiding work "secretary mode"? To explain that, I'll have to go into the realities of universal conscription. That will wait for a later date, but be sure I'm not a chauvinist - it's just life's harsh realities.

Personal - General Update

• Got a very much overdue haircut at the new local barber (he couldn't believe I was in the military, my hair got so long). I gather the haircutting business is very competitive here and now because he treats his customers very well, looking to score recommendations. Very reasonably priced, too. This should get my chain of command off my back for a couple of months. BTW, don't worry - I won't be blogging about shopping for underwear.

• Have been reading John Cowan's blog (recommended by Tim Bray). I envy his linguistics skills (I know more people who are gifted like that, namely Eli Bar-Yahalom). The entire xml-dev crowd seems fascinating, from where I stand.

  I have added some of his signatures to the sig DB I use at work. It's some Outlook VBA code that appends a random sig from an Access file upon sending an email. I've found it's a great conversation starter to draw the attention of geeks, because the people who can understand and comment my sigs are the ones I want to talk to. Also, I feel the need to show off.

• I haven't yet blogged about attending Adi Gigi's graduation ceremony on June 23d. We were, for a few months, together in programming training when she passed the "gibush" for naval officer training and was forced to choose (it's not cost-effective to let people do two costly voluntary training programs when they'll only serve in one post). She wisely chose the harder one and now, two years later, she's an officer on a Israel Navy ship.

  BTW, Israeli naval ranks are exactly the same as for the land services, so although it's called second lieutenant, actually she's an ensign.

  Letting women into the elite combat officer training programs is quite new - she's like the 10th (give or take) female to successfully complete the training, the first with her specialty, the only in her class (and with no females in the recent flight school batch at all, situation is not that good for women in combat).

  I have to mention the enlisted and commissioned crowd at the ceremony (Dani himself arrived to give them their insignia and ranks) was from a very different IDF than the one I serve in. The people I know from "the army" are IT types: analysts, application designers and coders, DBAs, systems people, tech support of various types, comms techs, etc. while the people there were boat crews, harbor defense, infantry, search and rescue, field intelligence, etc. Very little in common, except for the age and uniform (and not even that, with the navy). I felt like the geek that I am.